This Photo Is A Sensation --- No Kidding! Come And Find Out Why.

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Let’s have a close look at the photo. You see water - or rather a part of - what? The sea, a lake, a river? In this water you see a school of fish. Although there is nothing to compare their size with, it’s obvious that they’re small. This is certainly not a school of whales seen from, say, a plane. The ground is light grey - maybe sand - and dark grey - maybe some algae or whatever else can grow below water. So far, so boring! YET, what makes this idyllic scene so sensational is the location where the photo was taken, namely in a canal in the Italian town of VENICE. If you’ve never been to Venice, you may think, “So what?” Doesn’t everyone know that Venice is the town of canals, in fact that there are more canals than streets? That’s correct. YET, before the pandemic started, the traffic on the canals - barges for goods, steam boats for people (like buses in other cities), private speed boats and gigantic cruise liners lying at anchor practically in the town centre besides St Mark’s Square - made the water in the canals black and stinky. Had you fallen into it, you would probably have been taken to hospital and washed inside and outside. Before the pandemic you could have stared into the water for hours, you wouldn’t have seen a single fish. Nobody could recreate the sensation Lord Byron experienced in the late 18th century when he stayed in Venice and used to swim home after parties pushing a board with a candle on it through the canals to show him the way home. Will the canals stay as clean as they’re now? The Venetians must love the sight. Oh, yes, they do, but they also want to live. The town has no industry, it lives solely on tourism. And the Venetians are greedy. Everybody knows everything about how the town can be preserved, where flood gates must be built, how the fundaments of the houses can be stabilised and so on and so forth. Is it likely that this will be done in the foreseeable future? Sadly, it’s not likely, not likely at all. If you want to learn more about Venice and the characters of the Venetians, you should read the thrillers by the American Donna Leon. They’re all set in Venice. They show that the author has really understood the town and the people. So, if you have the time and the money, you should consider a trip to Venice immediately after the end of the pandemic and before ‘normal’, i.e. modern, life has returned to catch a glimpse of this unique town as it was during the time of Romanticism.